Geography, Product, and Process are familiar concepts, but what is an Enterprise sub-process? And
what is an Enhancement-Integration-Advancement leader?

To understand Enterprise sub-processes you need to realize that enterprise activities, those activities
where the enterprise interacts with its larger environment as an entity (e.g. public relations, government relations, investor relations, legal), can and should be turned into processes. And to
further realize that all of these enterprise activities are sub-processes in the larger enterprise process bucket.

The most confounding organizational abstractions are those of Enhancement, Integration, and Advancement, which are one and the same activity applied to different domains. In all cases they
correlate with efforts to improve elements of the business/enterprise. Enhancement includes improvement of critical business processes. Integration includes both Partner and Vendor integration
, where partner integration includes working with sales channels as well as mergers and acquisitions.
Vendor integration includes vendors providing services, software, and hardware (including parts) and the larger supply chain. Advancement includes putting new technology into both Product and Service.

Examples

To better understand these concepts we will explore an example executive team from a hypothetical
multi-national corporation. The executive team is composed of the following members in addition to
the CEO. Note that, as simplifications, support staff have been removed from the picture, and abstract team names are used.

Geographic Region 1 Lead

Geographic Region 2 Lead

Geographic Region 3 Lead

Geographic Region 4 Lean

Process - Finance Lead

Process - Product Development Lead

Process - HR Lead

Process - Marketing Lead

Process - IT Lead

Enterprise Sub-process - Communications Lead

Enterprise Sub-process - Legal Lead

Enterprise Sub-process - Government Relations Lead

Enhancement/Integration/Advancement (Improvement) Lead

Observation 1: The CEO, in essence, is the enterprise process lead, so there should be no surprise that
many enterprise sub-processes are part of his direct team. In the above example this includes Communications, Legal and Government Relations Leads.

Observation 2: Many processes leads are regional as opposed to being at the enterprise level. In other
words this organization is not a symmetric process based organization. No organization should be
expected to be symmetric across any leadership category. To understand this, let’s look one level deeper into one of the Regional Leads’ team:

Geographic Region 1 Lead

Geographic Sub-region 1 Sales/Service Lead

Geographic Sub-region 2 Lead

Product Line 1 Sales/Service Lead

Product Line 2 Sales/Service Lead

Product Line 3 Sales/Service Lead

Region Process - Manufacturing Lead

Region Process - IT Lead

Region Process - HR Lead

Region Process - Marketing Lead

Region Process - Finance Lead

Region Enterprise Sub-process - Legal Lead

Region Enterprise Sub-process - Government Relations Lead

Region Customer Experience Lead (Advancement Lead - as described above)

In analyzing this sub-team many asymmetries can be seen. We see the Sales, Service, and
Manufacturing process leads that were missing from the CEO’s team, as well as other process leads, are asymmetrically aligned with regions, sub-regions and products.

Also note the variation between Geographic Sub-region 1 and 2 Leads. The Geographic Sub-region 2
Lead would have Sales, Service, Manufacturing, Finance, IT, and other sub-region process leads as part
of his team, as opposed to the Sub-region 1 Lead, which leverages everything but sales and service from the larger region.

How specific asymmetries are chosen is based upon culture, process, and legal motivations that
underlie the differentiation or isolation in regions and sub-regions. In the above sales, service, and
manufacture are particularly differentiated by region. Thus, there are organizational asymmetries that
exist around those processes. An example motivation for one of these asymmetries would be cost structures for manual labor being different in different regions, which motivates more manual
manufacture processes or more automated manufacture processes for a region.

We discuss further below how to methodically identify which asymmetries will be most effective for
your own organization.

Critical Business Process 1 Enhancement Lead (i.e. Business Enhancement)

Customer Experience Lead (i.e. Hybrid Product/Service Advancement)

Note that several different types of improvement are missing from this high level team.

First, lower level partnership improvements are not included, but are rather delegated to marketing and sales organizations.

Second, only one type of process hybrid is captured. Other possible hybrid process
enhancements might include a hybrid product development and manufacturing enhancement where manufacturing rules are incorporated into the product development process so that
products can be designed for higher quality, as well as cheaper and quicker manufacture.

Third, only one critical business process enhancement has been identified for high level
attention. Many other processes might benefit from executive level attention.

Fourth, only a couple of product and service advancements have been identified for high-level
attention. Again, many different products and services might benefit from executive level attention.

The general concern in this situation, is whether or not the organization understands that they are
delegating many types of improvement lower in the organization, and whether they have a methodology to escalate improvements and innovations up the organization chain when necessary.

Method

Was rigor use to make asymmetrical slices along regions and products or was it intuitive. Rigor
requires collection of data, analysis of the data, and then creating a structure based on the data and
analysis. For organizational structures what data should be collected? What data indicates when an
organizational structure is working effectively or causing issues? Further, the collection of data,
analysis, and creation of effective structures needs to occur near-real-time so that organizations can adapt as their environment changes.

ITMM Leadership Improvement identifies what data to collect, how to do analysis, and how to create
structures. The above discussion was a short synopsis of what structures can be created for the
highest levels of an organization, including geographic, product, process, enterprise sub-process, and
improvement structures. Data that can be collected and analyzed includes tracking of management,
organization, extent, culture, and vision leadership activities. All of this is discussed in greater detail in the ITMM Leadership Improvement Online Training available at:
http://itmaturity.com/training.

Improvement needs occur across the full context of the organization (see ITMM LIO), whether or
not it sits in a top level office.

There are numerous hybrid process opportunities available that should be leveraged via organizational structures.

You should use mechanistic tools (like the ITMM LIO) to track, analyze, and evolve your organizational structures.

All of these items are covered in greater depth in ITMM LIO Training.

Executive Team Self Analysis Tool

Geography Leads

Product Leads

Process Leads

Enterprise Sub-Process Leads

Improvement (Enhancement/Integration/Advancement) Leads

Gaps, Issues, Asymmetries, DelegationsExample 1:
Asymmetry: Low cost for manual manufacture and regulations (legal reasons) in regions 3 and 4 forces different manufacture processes.Example 2: Asymmetry: Sales
and Service in region 4 is through a distributor channel for legal reasons.Example 3: Delegations: Non-critical partnerships, business process enhancements, and
product and service improvements can be delegated lower in the organization.

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